dystopia

We live, to use the ancient Chinese curse, in interesting times. Ignoring, for a moment, the geo-political shit storm that is roiling across the globe, there are things happening, just below the mainstream radar, that could impact our future in ways we’ve never imagined. Back in October of this year I wrote about how Facebook developed an artificial intelligence, which was designed to learn how to negotiate, and how it, instead, developed its own language, shut out the humans in charge, and did a decent job at its assigned task. That scared the hell out of a lot of people. The understatement masters at Facebook eventually had this to say, “There remains much potential for future work, particularly in exploring other reasoning strategies, and in improving the diversity of utterances without diverging from human language.” Simply put, all this cool shit is meaningless if the robots stop talking to us.
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